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Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov). The text of the film “The fall of an empire—the Lesson of Byzantium” / Ôèëüì / Âèçàíòèéñêèé óðîê

The text of the film “The fall of an empire—the Lesson of Byzantium”

Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)

11 ôåâðàëÿ 2008 ã.

Russian winter landscape. A church. A
snowstorm.

Narrator. Hello. In
1453, the Byzantine Empire fell. Let us now take a look at
how this happened.

Islamic chant weaves into the gusts of freezing
wind.

Instanbul. The muezzin continues his prayer, amplified
by a loudspeaker. The noise of a market place in a Middle
Eastern city. Turkish conversation.

Narrator. This city was once called
Constantinople; six centuries ago it was the capital city
of what was without exaggeration one of the greatest
civilizations in world history—the Byzantine Empire.

A rule by law, something we now take for
granted, was created here, based upon the Roman codes,
in Byzantium, 1500 years ago. A legal system which was
to become the basic foundation of all types of laws in
most modern governments was the monumental creation of
Byzantine jurisprudence during the reign of Emperor
Justinian. The system of elementary and higher
education first developed in Byzantium; it was here, in
the fifth century, that the first university appeared.
The most stable financial system in the history of
mankind was created in Byzantium, and existed in a
nearly unaltered form for over one thousand years.
Modern diplomacy with its basic principles, rules of
conduct, and etiquette was created and refined here, in
Byzantium. Byzantine engineering and architectural arts
were unrivalled. Even today, such famous works by
Byzantine masters as the domes of the Hagia Sophia
amaze the world with their technological perfection.

No other empire in human history lasted as long as
Byzantium. It existed for 1123 years. In comparison: the
great Roman Empire collapsed 800 after its establishment;
the Ottoman Empire fell apart after 500 years; the Chinese
Qing (or Manchu) Empire, after 300 years. The Russian
Empire lasted 200; the British, 150; the Austro-Hungarian
empire lasted around 100 years. During its height,
Byzantium was home to one sixth of the entire world
population. The Empire stretched from Gibraltar to the
Euphrates and Arabia. It encompassed the territories of
modern Greece and Turkey, Israel and Egypt, Bulgaria,
Serbia and Albania, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco, part of
Italy, Spain, and Portugal. There were around one thousand
cities in Byzantium—nearly as many as in modern
Russia.

The capital city’s incalculable
wealth, its beauty and elegance, amazed all the
European peoples, who were still barbarians at the time
when the Byzantine Empire was in its apogee. One can
only imagine—indeed, history records it as
such—how crude, ignorant Scandinavians, Germans,
Franks, and Anglo-Saxons, whose chief occupation at the
time was primitive sacking and pillage, after arriving
from some town like Paris or London (which had
populations of some tens of thousands) to this
megalopolis of millions, a city of enlightened
citizens, scholars, and elegantly dressed youths
crowding imperial universities, dreamt of only one
thing: invading and robbing, robbing and invading. In
fact, when this was actually accomplished in 1204 by an
army of Europeans calling themselves Crusaders, who,
instead of freeing the Holy Land treacherously sacked
the most beautiful city in the world, , Byzantine
treasures were carried away in an uninterrupted flow
over the course of fifty years. Hundreds of tons of
precious coin alone were carried away at a time when
the annual budget of the wealthiest European countries
was no more than two tons of gold.

Venice. The Cathedral of St. Mark. All the
columns, marble, and precious adornments were stolen at
that very time. By the way, those horses are from the
imperial quadriga, carried away from Constantinople by
the Crusaders.

Priceless holy relics and works of art were looted, but
even more taken by barbarians from Brussels, London,
Nuremburg, and Paris were simply destroyed—melted
down into coin or thrown away like refuse. To this day,
the museums of Europe are bursting with stolen Byzantine
treasures. But let us take into consideration that only a
small portion was actually preserved.

It was during this period of looting that the monstrous
modern lending system was created using treasures stolen
from Constantinople. This average sized city in
Italy—Venice—was the New York of the
thirteenth century. The financial fate of nations was
decided here. At first most of the booty was easily taken
by sea to Venice and Lombardy (the Russian word for
“pawn shop” to this day is
“Lombard”). The first European banks began to
spring up like mushrooms after a good rain. The English
and Dutch, more reserved than their contemporary Italians
and Germans, joined the activity a little later, and, with
the help of Byzantine riches pouring in, developed that
famous capitalism with its inevitable lust for profits,
which is essentially a sort of genetic continuation of the
sport of military plunder. The first significant Jewish
capital was a result of speculation in Byzantine relics.

An unprecedented flow of free money caused the Western
European cities to grow wildly, and became the decisive
catalyst in the development of craft, science, and the
arts. The barbaric West became the civilized West only
after it had taken over, stolen, destroyed, and swallowed
up the Byzantine Empire.

We must admit that our own Slavic forebears were no more
well-mannered, and also succumbed to the barbaric
temptation to get rich quick at the expense of
Constantinople’s seemingly inexhaustible wealth.
However, to their credit, and fortunately for us, their
lust for the spoils of war did not eclipse the most
important thing: Russians comprehended Byzantium’s
greatest treasure! This was neither gold, nor expensive
textiles, nor even art and sciences. The greatest treasure
of Byzantium was God.

Having traveled the world over in search of the truth and
God, Prince Vladimir’s ambassadors experienced only
in Byzantium that a true relationship between God and man
exists; that it is possible for us to have living contact
with another world. “We did not know whether we were
in heaven or on earth,” said the ancestors of
present-day Russians, astounded by their experience of
Divine Liturgy in the Empire’s most important
cathedral, the Hagia Sophia. They understood just
what kind of treasure can be obtained in
Byzantium. It was upon this treasure that our great
forebears founded not banks, nor capital, nor even museums
and pawn shops. They founded Rus’, Russia, the
spiritual successor of Byzantium.

So what made it possible for a nation so
great in the arena of world history, with such
extraordinary capabilities, to so suddenly begin to
lose its life force? What is most interesting is that
the problems Byzantium met during its period of
decline—aggression from foreign nations, natural
disasters, economic and political crises—were
nothing new for this over a thousand-year-old
government with its proven mechanism for getting out of
the most difficult situations. After all, the empire
had experienced all these things before, and had
overcome them.

Yes, there were many envious enemies both east and west,
there were earthquakes, there were plagues; but it was not
these which crushed Byzantium. All of these problems could
have been overcome if only the Byzantines had been able to
overcome themselves.

Today we will talk about that inner enemy which appeared
within the spiritual bowels of Byzantine society, and
broke the spirit of that great nation, turning it into a
helpless victim of those historical calls—calls
which Byzantium was no longer able to answer.

Nowadays we generally assess a
society’s well-being according to its economy.
Although the word “economics,” and even the
science of economics itself hales from Byzantium, the
Byzantines themselves never gave it much attention. The
Byzantine financial-economic system underwent several
serious crises during the course of history, but the
effectiveness of the Empire’s industry and
agriculture generally enabled it to weather the storms.
It suffices to say that for a thousand years, all
international trade was based upon the Byzantine gold
coin.

But Byzantium could not solve the problem of its
government’s loss of control over its own finances
and the huge, ungovernable process of capital flow towards
the West, to developing Europe, and this is what finally
destroyed its economy. The government dropped all levers
of trade and industry, and in the end gave all its trade
and industrial resources over to foreign entrepreneurs.

It happened like this: An important financial resource in
the country was not gas and oil, as it is now, but customs
obtained from the enormous international trade in the
Bosphorus and Dardenelles. The Byzantines, who earlier
relied solely upon their own capability to govern the
country’s economics, suddenly began heated
discussions about, and finally decided upon, consigning
the problems of international trade to their foreign
friends, who were more resourceful, and ready to take
responsibility for the expense of complex transport, armed
guards along trade routes, the construction of new ports,
and the intensification and development of commercial
activities. Western specialists were called in from Venice
and Genoa, towns which had grown large on several
centuries of Byzantine trade. They were granted duty-free
trade, and entrusted with the patrol of sea routes along
the Empire’s territory.

The West began by hook or by crook to lure
Byzantium into the formative prototype of unified
European trade organizations; and, taking advantage of
one of the most complicated periods in the life of the
Empire, succeeded in reaching its aim: Emperor Alexios
Komnenos signed an international trade agreement to the
Empire’s great disadvantage, called the
“Golden Bulla.” This agreement was in
actuality deceitful, and profitable only to the West.

At first everyone was pleased: the government saved a lot
of money that formerly went to its trade and military
fleets, trade increased, and the city’s shops and
markets overflowed with European and Asian products they
had never seen before. But this did not come without a
price. After just a few decades, domestic industry and
agriculture degraded sharply.

All the Byzantine traders either went bankrupt or became
dependent upon foreigners. When the country finally
realized what was happening, it was too late. The
“Golden Bulla” was annulled, and Emperor
Andronikos tried to reverse the flow of money back towards
his empire. He confiscated all foreign commercial
enterprises, which were draining the government of its
last resources. Both he and the country paid dearly for
this. He himself was brutally murdered; as for his
country… The republic of Venice, which had by that
time become a huge financial oligarchy, hired a whole
crusade, and sent it to sack Constantinople instead of
Jerusalem. The Byzantines, who had up until then
considered the crusaders to be in general brothers in the
faith and military allies, were so unprepared for such an
underhanded blow that it was unable to organize sufficient
defense. In 1204, French, German, and Italian contingents
of the Western union advanced upon Constantinople and took
it over. The city was mercilessly pillaged and put to the
torch.

At the same time Venice, considered then
to be the stronghold of free enterprise, announced to
the whole Western world that it was only restoring
disdained law and order and the rights of a free
international market; and mainly, it was warring with a
regime which denies all European values. This was the
moment when the West began to create an image of
Byzantium as a heretical “evil empire.” As
time went by, this image would continually be pulled
out for use from Western ideological arsenals.

Although Constantinople was recovered sixty years later,
Byzantium would never recover from the blow. Meanwhile,
foreign traders would retain complete control over both
the economy and the Byzantine market.

Another unresolved problem in Byzantium was corruption and
oligarchy. The government warred with them continually,
and was for a long time was effective. Bureaucrats and
financial schemers who had gone too far were punished and
exiled, their possessions completely confiscated and given
to the treasury. However, the authorities never really had
the strength and resolve to sever this evil
systematically. Oligarchs gathered entire armies under the
pretext of servants and guards, and plunged the government
into the thick of civil wars.

How did these oligarchs emerge in
Byzantium, and why did they become uncontrollable?
Byzantium had always been a strictly centralized
bureaucratic government; however, this was by no means
its weakness, but rather its historical strength. All
efforts to combine authority with personal interests
were cut off firmly and decisively. However, during one
moment in the period of political and administrative
reforms, the temptation arose to exchange the old and
seemingly awkward bureaucratic machinery for something
more effective and flexible, in which the
government’s role would be limited, and relegated
to that of an overseer of formal legalities. To put it
simply, the government, out of good intentions and with
its eye upon European experience, in fact willingly
relinquished a portion of its strategic monopolistic
functions, handing them over to small circle of
families.

However, contrary to the government’s expectations,
this new aristocracy it was feeding did not remain long
under the control of the bureaucratic apparatus.
Resistance continued with alternating success, and ended
in a serious political crisis, out of which the government
could escape only at the price of irreversible concessions
to foreigners. We know what happened after this. The
oligarchic corruption of the government continued up until
the very takeover of Constantinople by the Turks.

Incidentally, the oligarchs not only failed to provide the
government with money or arms during this final invasion
by the Turks, but even grabbed what little was left in the
treasury. When the young Sultan Mehmed met took the city,
he was shocked at the exorbitant wealth of some citizens
while the city’s army was completely lacking. He
summoned the richest citizens and asked them a simple
question: why they did not provide any money for the
city’s protection from the enemy? “We were
saving these funds for your Sultanic Majesty,” was
their flattering answer. Mehmed had them punished
immediately in the cruelest manner: their heads were
chopped off, and their bodies thrown to the dogs. Those
oligarchs who fled to the West hoping to hide their
capital were mercilessly fleeced by their Western
“friends,” and ended their lives in poverty.

A huge problem of the Byzantine government during the
period of decline was its frequent change in political
direction, which could be called a lack of stability and
succession in governmental powers. With each change of
emperors, the empire’s direction would often change
drastically. This weakened the country severely, and
cruelly exhausted the population.

Political stability is one of the most important
conditions for a strong state. This was the testament of
the great Byzantine emperors. However, they began to
disregard this testament. There was a period when a new
emperor was in power every four years on the average.
Could it have been possible under such conditions for the
country to undergo a revival, or complete any large-scale
state projects—projects which would have required
many years of systematic effort?

Of course, there were also very strong
emperors in Byzantium. One example was Basil II, who
was, by the way, Grand Prince Vladimir’s
godfather. He took on the Empire’s rule after a
serious crisis: the country had been practically
privatized by oligarchs. First of all, he took tough
measures to enforce a vertical power structure, quelled
all separatist movements in outlying territories, and
suppressed rebellious governors and oligarchs, who were
preparing to dismember the empire. Then he
“purged” the government, and confiscated
huge sums of stolen money.

Basil II’s strict measures allowed him to build the
state treasury to unprecedented sums—the
Empire’s annual income was ninety tons of gold
during his reign. As a comparison, Russia reached such
levels only towards the beginning of the 19th
century.

Basil significantly weakened the mighty regional
oligarch-magnates. These local sovereigns’ influence
and power were at times incomparably greater than that of
the official governors. Once, during a military campaign,
the Asia Minor magnate Eustaphios Maleinos demonstratively
invited Emperor Basil and his troops to rest at his
estate, and was easily able to accommodate this huge army
until they had sufficiently recuperated. This oligarch
seriously hoped to influence the country’s fate. He
began his intrigues, then moved his own puppet candidate
forward to the upper levels of authority. Later he would
pay dearly for this. All of his vast property was
confiscated, and he himself was sent to one of the most
distant prisons in the Empire.

After the rebellion of another magnate, Bardos Skleros,
was put down, Skleros even advised Basil II in a candid
discussion to exhaust the magnates with taxes, special
tasks, and governmental service, so that they would not
have time to get so rich and powerful.

Having restored the verticality of authority in the
country, Basil left a sort of “stabilization
fund” to his successor which was so large, that, in
the words of Michael Psellos, he had to dig new labyrinths
in the underground treasury stores. This national reserve
was designated first of all for military reforms and the
organization of a professional, capable army.
Basil’s successors, however, ineptly squandered this
reserve.

Byzantium in general had quite a problem
with her “successors,” although the
Byzantines were the greatest specialists in the world
in the area of royal succession. They did not have the
principle of inheritance to the throne. Wishing to
ensure that power succeed to a worthy heir, the
emperors usually chose one or two candidates, and
actively drew them into governmental affairs, delegated
high and responsible positions in the government to
them, and observed them. There was even a system
whereby the country would have at one time an emperor
and so-called junior emperors, the heirs. This was all
very reasonable, but no matter how well they honed this
system of succession, in the final analysis it became
clear that it was simply the luck of the draw.

Basil II was unlucky. Too occupied with governmental
affairs, he was unable to prepare a worthy successor, and
the throne passed to his natural brother Constantine VIII.
When the new emperor began to feel free, powerful, and
fabulously wealthy, he dedicated himself not to
governmental affairs, but rather to ecstatic daydreams
about accomplishments and glory which were supposed to
eclipse those of his brother. The results were sorrowful:
under the aegis of the dreamer in porphyry, the cynical
ruling elite quickly lost the obedience and discipline
cultivated by Basil II, and immersed themselves in power
struggles with renewed vigor.

Although the oligarchs quickly achieved their aim, it came
with a price. If Basil II punished insubordination by
confiscation of property, or, in extreme cases, by
blinding (a punishment not uncommon during the Middle
Ages), his successor, the hysterical Constantine, during
fits of anger, castrated half of his contemporary
Byzantine administrative elite. Furthermore, his
extravagance eclipsed even that of one of the most
dissolute emperors of the country’s period of
decline, whose nickname was “The Drunkard,”
and like him, in a state of inebriation, entertained the
rabble at the city hippodrome, three times larger than
this Roman Coliseum.

The next successor also failed to fulfill expectations.
The vertical, central power structure began to collapse.
The result of a new uprising amongst the clans and elite
and the continual re-shifting of property was predictably
deplorable—within fifty years the Empire found
itself on the brink of destruction.

The large stabilizing fund, in the hands
of inept sovereigns, caused more harm than
good—this money gained without effort began to
work against the country by corrupting society. The
same historian, Michael Psellos, remarked bitterly that
the empire “grew sick” from the misuse and
plunder of this money set aside by Basil. “The
government’s body,” he wrote, “became
bloated. Some were glutted with money; others were
stuffed to the gills with ranks, and their lifestyle
became unhealthy and destructive.

Thus, succession of power was a matter of life and death
for the Empire. When there is stability in succession and
development, the country has a future; without
stability—collapse. But the people did not fully
understand this, and kept demanding various changes.
Opportunists and run-away oligarchs also played on these
popular moods. They would usually hide somewhere abroad
and support various intrigues with the aim of overthrowing
this or that emperor who did not suit them, providing for
their own man and new re-assignments of property. Such an
individual was a certain Bessarion, a mediocre scholar,
unprincipled politician, and ingenious intriguer of the
15th century, who fled Byzantium for Rome and
received there political asylum. Bessarion coordinated the
entire opposition in Constantinople and caused no small
headache to the government. He went on further to become a
Catholic cardinal. He bought himself a house in Rome.
After his death, his Western protectors even named a small
street on the edge of town after him.

Another serious and incurable disease
never before a problem in Byzantium also developed: the
question of nationality.

The fact of the matter is that nationality problems in
Byzantium really had not existed for many centuries. As
the historical, lawful descendants of ancient Rome, which
was destroyed by barbarians in the fifth century, the
inhabitants of Byzantium called themselves Romans. In a
vast empire divided into many nationalities there was one
faith—Orthodox Christianity. The Byzantines
literally fulfilled the Christian teaching of a new
humanity living in a Divine spirit, where “there is
neither Greek, nor Jew, nor Scythe,” as the Apostle
Paul wrote. This hope preserved the country from the
destructive storm of ethnic conflict. It was enough for
any pagan or foreigner to accept the Orthodox Faith, and
confirm it in deed, in order to become a full member of
society. On the Byzantine throne, for example, were almost
as many Armenians as there were Greeks; there were also
citizens of Syrian, Arabian, Slavic, and Germanic origin.
Amongst the higher ranks of government were
representatives of all peoples in the Empire—the
main requirements were their competence and dedication to
the Orthodox Faith. This provided Byzantine civilization
with incomparable cultural wealth.

The only foreign elements for the Byzantines were people
who were strange to Orthodox morals and to the ancient
Byzantine culture and perception of the world. For
example, coarse, ignorant, money-grubbing Western
Europeans of the time were considered barbarian by the
Romans. Emperor Constantine VII, “The
Purple-born,” instructed his son when choosing a
bride, “Inasmuch as every nation has its own
traditions, laws, and customs, one should unite in
matrimony only with one from amongst his own
people.”

In order to understand the emperor’s thoughts
correctly, we must recall that his great grandfather was a
Scandinavian by the name of Inger, his grandfather was the
son of an Armenian man and Slavic woman from Macedonia,
his wife was the daughter of an Armenian man and a Greek
woman, and his daughter-in-law was the daughter of an
Italian king. His granddaughter, Anna, became the wife of
the Russian Prince Vladimir, just after the latter was
baptized.

The very idea of a “nation”
was actually a European concept which later in
Byzantium evolved into an idea of their own national
superiority (or more precisely, of that of the Greeks,
around whom Byzantium had grown). Europeans lived in
smaller states built upon ethnic principles; for
example, France, Germanic countries, and Italian
republics. National custom was good and correct for
them; but the fact of the matter was that Byzantium was
not an ethnic state, but rather a multi-national
empire, and this was an essential difference. For one
hundred years the Byzantines warred with this
temptation and did not allow themselves to be broken.
“We are all Romans—Orthodox citizens of the
New Rome,” they proclaimed.

It must be noted that this all unfolded at the very
beginning of the epoch called by historians the
“Renaissance”—the world-wide creation of
a nationalistic, Hellenic-Greek, pagan ideal. It was
understandably difficult for the Greeks not to be tempted
by this Western European renaissance, and the European
fascination with the culture of their great, ancient Greek
ancestors.

The first to give in were the intelligentsia. The
enlightened Byzantines began to sense their Greekness.
Nationalistic movements began, then the denial of
Christian traditions, and finally, during the reign of the
Paleologi, the imperial ideal gave way to a narrow,
ethnically Greek nationalism. However this betrayal of the
imperial ideal was costly—the nationalistic fever
tore the empire apart, and it was then quickly swallowed
up by the neighboring Moslem empire.

One apologist for Hellenic nationalism, the liberal
scholar Plethon, arrogantly wrote to Emperor Manuel II,
“We, the people whom you command and govern, are
Greeks by descent, as our language and educational
heritage testify!” Such words would have been
unthinkable even a century earlier. However, Plethon wrote
them on the eve of the fall of Constantinople, in which
were living people no longer Roman, but rather Greeks,
Armenians, Slavs, Arabs, and Italians, in enmity with one
another.

Greek arrogance led to the discrediting of Slavs in the
Empire. Byzantium thereby estranged the Serbs and
Bulgarians, who could have provided real help in the
struggle with the Turks. The result was that the peoples
of the once united Byzantium began to be at enmity with
one another.

The West did not miss the chance to take
advantage of this new problem: it began to forcefully
convince the Serbs and Bulgarians that the Greeks have
been suppressing their national identity for centuries.
Several real revolutions were provoked, and finally,
with the help of economic and military forces, the West
insisted upon the Serbs’ and Bulgarians’
separation from Byzantium and unification with Latin
Europe. These nationalities took the bait, exclaiming
suddenly, “We are also Europeans!” The West
promised them material and military aide, but of
course, deceived them, instead throwing them cynically
before themselves as a buffer along the warpath of the
Turkish hordes. The Balkan states, so loyal to the
West, found themselves under the cruel Turkish yoke for
many long centuries. And Byzantium was no longer able
to help. National arrogance thus played a wicked role
for the empire.

Another great problem was the gradual loss of control over
the far-flung provinces. The contrast between the
provinces and the satiated, wealthy capital,
Constantinople, which lived for the most part at the
expense of these impoverished areas, became very sharp. At
the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Byzantine
writer Micheal Choniates wrote to the capital’s
inhabitants in bitter reproach, “Do not all riches
flow into the city as rivers into the sea? But you do not
wish to take a look at the towns around you, who await
some fairness from you. You send them one tax collector
after another with brutish teeth, in order to devour their
last morsels. You yourselves remain in your city to enjoy
your peace, and extract the riches.”

Even the capital city’s chief administrator, the
eparch of Constantinople, enjoyed a particular status in
the country, and his contemporaries often compared his
power with that of the Emperor, “only without the
purple,” as they would say. One such eparch once
became so feverishly involved in the building of high-rise
buildings in the capital that he could only be stopped by
a special imperial order forbidding the construction of
buildings over ten stories.

All political, cultural and social life essentially took
place in Constantinople. The government did not wish to
notice that a serious imbalance was developing, and the
forsaken provinces were becoming more and more decayed.
Gradually, the tendency to flee to the center became
increasingly marked.

Governors of these distant territories
also played their deceitful games. Money budgeted and
sent to the provinces was shamelessly expropriated. It
would not have been half so bad if this stolen money
had gone only towards the enrichment of governors and
their proteges. But the money was often used to create
real armies under the guise of peace officers. These
battalions were often more capable in battle than the
regular army.

When the government weakened, the provinces separated. The
government watched this process unfold almost helplessly.
But the rebellious governors, having freed themselves of
central authority, were not long to remain captivated by
their own high hopes. Together with their hapless
population, they almost immediately fell prey to the cruel
authority of the non-Orthodox. When this happened, the
local population was usually destroyed completely, and the
region re-settled by Turks and Persians.

The demographic problem was one of the most serious
problems in Byzantium. The Empire was gradually inhabited
by peoples of a foreign spirit, who firmly supplanted the
native Orthodox population. The country’s ethnic
composition changed visibly. This was in some ways an
irreversible process, for the birth rate in Byzantium was
decreasing. But this was not the worst thing. Something
similar had earlier occurred periodically. The catastrophe
was that the peoples who were pouring into the Empire were
no longer becoming Romans, as they once had done, but
remained permanently foreign, aggressive, and enemy. Now
the newcomers treated Byzantium not as their new homeland,
but only as potential property which should sooner or
latter come into their own hands.

This happened also because the Empire
refused to educate the people—a concession it had
made to the new, renaissance-era demagogy declaring
state ideology to be a violation of the individual.
However, nature abhors a vacuum. Having voluntarily
renounced their thousand-year ideological function of
educating and cultivating the people, the Byzantines
made way for influences upon the minds and souls of
their citizens; influences which were not so much a
promotion of independent and free thinking as they were
a form of intentional ideological aggression, aimed at
destroying the foundations of state and society.

But the Byzantines had amazing, incomparable experience!
The best leaders of the Empire were capable of using their
vast inheritance—a wealth of experience in
governance and subordination. As a result of this acumen,
cruel barbarians, after partaking of the great Christian
culture, became the most reliable allies, received
grandiose titles and vast estates, were numbered amongst
the highest ranks of government service, and fought for
the interests of the Empire in the furthest stretches of
its territory.

As for demographic issues, and the eternal headache of any
empire—separatism in the outlying areas—the
best Byzantine Emperors left as an inheritance proven
methods of solving these issues; for example, creating
conditions for the massive resettlement of the inhabitants
of centralized areas to the outlying provinces. This would
quickly spark an explosion in the birth rate, and
effectuate an extraordinary adaptability to the new
locality in the second generation.

However, this wealth of experience was cruelly mocked and
criminally disregarded in favor of foreign opinion; and,
finally, it was irretrievably lost!

But just what was this invasive opinion? Whose views did
the Byzantines begin to value? Who was able to so
influence their minds that they began to commit such
suicidal mistakes, one after another? It is hard to
believe that such enormous reverence and dependence could
have developed with regard to that same once barbaric
West, which had for centuries so enviously and greedily
looked upon Byzantium’s wealth, and then coldly and
systematically grew fat upon its gradual dissolution.

Byzantium was a unique state which
differed from both the East and the West. Everyone
recognized this fact; some were exhilarated by it,
others hated this independence, while others felt
oppressed by it. Be this as it may, Byzantium’s
difference from the rest of world was an objective
reality. First of all, Byzantium was the only country
in the world which stretched over a huge territory
between Europe and Asia, and its geography was already
a large contributing factor to its uniqueness. It is
also a very important fact that Byzantium was a
multi-national empire by nature, in which the people
felt the state to be one of their highest personal
treasures. This was entirely incomprehensible to the
Western world, where individualism and personal
self-will had already been raised to the status of
sacred principle.

Byzantium’s soul, and its meaning of existence, was
Orthodoxy—the unspoiled confession of Christianity,
in which no dogmas had changed essentially for a thousand
years. The West simply could not endure such demonstrative
conservatism, called it undynamic, obtuse, and limited; it
finally began with grim fanaticism to demand that
Byzantium modernize her whole life in the Western
image—first of all in the religious, spiritual
spheres, and then in intellectual and material spheres.
With respect to the uniqueness and particularity of
Byzantium, the West, despite its occasional raptures over
Byzantine civilization, pronounced the sentence: it must
all be destroyed; if necessary, together with Byzantium
and her spiritual inheritors.

Not a bad organ. Also invented and created in Byzantium.
In the ninth century it was brought here to Western
Europe, and from that time on, as you see, it has taken
root.

Of course, it is senseless to say that the West was to
blame for Byzantium’s misfortunes and fall. The West
was only pursuing its own interests, which is quite
natural. Byzantium’s historical blows occurred when
the Byzantines themselves betrayed their own principles
upon which their empire was established. These great
principles were simple, and known to every Byzantine from
childhood: faithfulness to God, to His eternal laws
preserved in the Orthodox Church, and fearless reliance
upon their own internal traditions and strengths.

For hundreds of years, Byzantine emperors
both wise and not so wise, successful governors and
inept commanders, saints on the throne and bloody
tyrants, when faced with a fateful choice, knew that by
following these two rules they ensure their
Empire’s ability to survive.

In the Holy Scriptures, which every Byzantine knew, this
is stated very specifically: I call heaven and earth
to witness before you this day: I have offered you life
and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that ye might
live, and your descendents also (Deut. 30:19).

In Byzantium, after the end of the 13th
century, two parties emerged—one called for reliance
upon the country’s internal strengths—to
believe in them unconditionally, and to develop the
country’s colossal potential. It was prepared to
accept Western European experience discriminately, after a
serious test of time, but only in those cases where such
changes would not touch the fundamental basics of the
people’s faith and state politics. The other
party—pro-Western—whose representatives
pointed to the indubitable fact that Europe is developing
more rapidly and successfully, began to proclaim more and
more loudly that Byzantium has historically exhausted
itself as a political, cultural, and religious phenomenon,
and to demand a root-level re-working of all state
institutions in the image of Western European countries.

Representatives of the pro-Western party, secretly, or
more often, openly supported by European governments, held
an undoubted victory over the imperial traditionalists.
Under their guidance, a series of important reforms took
place, including those economic, military, political, and
finally, ideological and religious. All of these reforms
ended in total collapse, and lead to such spiritual and
material destruction in the Empire that it remained
absolutely defenseless before its Eastern
neighbor—the Turkish Sultanate.

First of all, the pro-Western party began
to re-evaluate its fatherland’s history, culture,
and Faith. However, instead of healthy criticism, they
offered only destructive self-abnegation. Everything
Western was exulted, and everything of their own was
held in contempt. Byzantine history was distorted,
faith and tradition were mocked, and the army was
degraded. The whole of Byzantium began to be painted as
a sort of universal monster.

The wealthy Byzantine younger generation no longer studied
in its own country, but rather left to study abroad. The
best minds of Byzantine science emigrated to the
West—the state ceased to give them the proper
attention. Emperor Theodore II foretold, “Rejected
science will become our enemy and will take up arms
against us. It will either consign us to destruction, or
turn us into barbarians. I write this in a state of gloomy
melancholy.” The Emperor’s presentiment did
not deceive him. During the final, fatal attack on
Constantinople, a brilliant metal-casting scholar, a
Hungarian named Urban, offered to create for the Emperor
large artillery armaments which could sweep away the
Turkish troops. But the treasury was empty, and the rich
of Constantinople did not give any money. Not having
received payment, the insulted Urban offered his services
to Sultan Mehmed. The Sultan seized the opportunity which
would give him the capability to destroy the city’s
invincible walls. He provided unlimited funds and began
the project. Finally, the canons of Urban, the best
student of the Byzantine ballistics school, decided the
Empire’s fate.

Western reforms in the military along
Western lines had begun long before this. In Byzantium
there had for many centuries existed a proven, although
not always effective system called stratiotes—a
national regular army with mandatory service from the
age of eighteen. With time, the Byzantine army
underwent serious changes. An army of the new type
required significant capital. The very stabilization
fund of Basil II was earmarked precisely for the
creation of an effective army. The fund, as we recall,
was squandered, while decisions were made to totally
re-vamp the army according the image of a Western
professional one. At that time, the Byzantine mind was
captivated by the image of Western knights, all nailed
into suits of armor—the latest achievement of
contemporary military industry. “My Byzantines
are like clay pots,” one emperor commented
contemptuously about his warriors, “but the
Western knights are like iron kettles!” To be
brief, as a result of the reforms, they took apart
their regular army, but never built the professional
one. In the final analysis, they took the course of
forming a block with the West within the framework of a
new military-political union. In practice this meant
that during the most critical periods of war they were
forced to resort to a professional army, but not of
their own—to a mercenary one. What it means to
have a mercenary army, how loyal and capable it is, the
Byzantines learned by very bitter experience.

Attempting to rely on the West’s experience, the
state became more and more ineffective. Even so, they
stubbornly sought salvation in a new imitation of Western
examples.

The final and most devastating blow to Byzantium was the
ecclesiastical union with Rome. Formally, this was the
submission of the Orthodox Church to the Roman Pope for
purely practically reasons. One after another aggressive
attack from foreign nations forced the country to make the
choice: either to rely on God and their own strengths, or
to concede their age-long principles upon which their
state was founded, and receive in return military and
economic aide from the Latin West. And the choice was
made. In 1274, Emperor Michael Paleologus decided upon a
root concession to the West. For the first time in
history, ambassadors from the Byzantine Emperor were sent
to Lyon to accept the supremacy of the Pope of Rome.

As it turned out, the advantages the
Byzantines received in exchange for their ideological
concession were negligible. The pro-Western
party’s calculations not only were unjustified,
they collapsed. The union with Rome did not continue
for long. The Grecophile Pope Leo IV, who had drawn
Byzantium into the Union out of better intentions, died
soon after the Union was concluded, and his successor
turned out to be of a completely different spirit: the
interests of the Latin West were first on his list. He
demanded that Byzantium change completely, that it
re-make itself in the image and likeness of the West.
When these changes did not happen, the Pope
excommunicated his newly-baked spiritual son, Emperor
Michael Paleologus, and called Europe to a new crusade
against Byzantium. The Orthodox converts to Catholicism
were pronounced bad Catholics. The Byzantines were
supposed to get the point that the West needed only
complete and unconditional religious and political
submission. Not only the Pope was to be recognized as
infallible, but the West itself as well.

Another terrible loss from betrayal of the Faith was the
loss of trust amongst the people in the government. The
Byzantines were shocked by the betrayal of their highest
value—Orthodoxy. They saw that it is possible for
the government to play with the most important thing in
life—the truths of the Faith. The meaning of the
Byzantines’ existence was lost. This was the final
and main blow which destroyed the country. And although by
far not all accepted the Union, the people’s spirit
was broken. In place of their former thirst for life and
energetic resolve to action, there appeared a terrible
general apathy and fatigue. The people no longer wanted to
live.

This horror has happened during various periods in
history, with various peoples, and with entire
civilizations. This is how the ancient Hellenic people
died out, amongst whom an inexplicable demographic crisis
occurred during the first centuries A.D. People did not
want to live; they did not want to continue their
generation. The rare families that did form often had no
children. The children who were born died from a lack of
parental care. Abortions became a ubiquitous practice. The
darkest occult and Gnostic cults came aggressively to the
forefront—cults characterized by hatred for life.
Suicide became one of the main causes of death amongst the
population. This conscious dying out of a population has
been called by science “endogenous psychosis of the
I-III centuries”—a mass pathology and loss of
meaning for continued existence.

Something similar happened in Byzantium
after the conclusion of the Union. The crisis in state
ideology led to total pessimism. Spiritual and moral
decline began to take over, along with unbelief,
interest in astrology, and the most primitive
superstitions. Alcoholism became a true scourge of the
male population. A morbid interest in long-forgotten
mysteries of the ancient Greeks arose. An
intelligentsia fascinated with neo-paganism consciously
and cynically destroyed the foundations of Christian
Faith in the people. Processes of depopulation and
family crises ensued. Out of the 150 Byzantine
intellectuals known to us to have lived during the late
14th, early 15th centuries, only
twenty-five had families of their own.

This is only a small part of what came to Byzantium due to
the decision amongst the elite to sacrifice higher ideals
for the sake of practical advantages. The soul collapsed;
in a great nation, who had given the world grandiose
examples of flights of spirit, now reigned unbridled
cynicism and squabbles. One Russian pilgrim wrote bitterly
during the mid 14th century, “Greeks are
those who have no love.”

The best minds of Byzantium watched with sorrow as the
Empire gradually died, but no one heeded their warnings.
The high profile statesman, Theodore Metochites, who saw
no salvation for Byzantium, wept over the former greatness
of the “Romans” and their “perished
happiness.” He lamented the Empire “wasted by
illnesses, easily succumbing to every attack by its
neighbors, and become the helpless victim of fate and
eventuality.”

A new Union signed in Florence, in what
was now a completely mad hope for help from the West,
did not change a thing. For the Byzantines themselves
this was a new moral blow of great magnitude. Now, not
only the Emperor, but even the Holy Patriarch shared
the faith of the Latins.

However, despite various hierarchs’ betrayals, the
Orthodox Church stood firm. “All were against the
Union,” a Byzantine historian relates.

“O, piteous Romans!” monk Gennadios Scholarios
wrote prophetically from his reclusion after the signing
of the Florentine Union, and fourteen years before the
fall of Constantinople. “Why have you gone astray
from the right path? You have departed from hope in God
and begun to hope in the might of the Franks. Together
with the city, in which everything will soon be destroyed,
have you apostatized from your piety? Be merciful to me, O
Lord! I witness before the face of God that I am not
guilty of this. Return, wretched citizens, and think about
what you are doing! Together with the captivity which will
soon befall us, you have apostatized from your
fathers’ inheritance and begun to confess dishonor.
Woe to you, when God’s judgment shall come upon
you!”

The words of Gennadios Scholarios came true to the letter.
And he himself was to carry the unbearably heavy cross of
a bitter patriarchate—he became the first Orthodox
patriarch in Constantinople after its fall to the Turks.

The fatal year of 1453 was approaching. In
April, Sultan Mehmed, still a very young man of
twenty-one, about the age of a college sophomore in
todays’ Istanbul, attacked Constantinople. The
Sultan was absolutely delirious with the idea of taking
the Romans’ capital. His elder
councilors-viziers, one of whom was a secret agent from
Byzantium, persuaded him to cancel the attack, saying
that it was too dangerous to battle on two fronts, for
all were certain that battalions from Genoa and Venice
would arrive any minute. But the Sultan turned out to
be a disobedient pupil.

The promised help from Europe, of course, did not arrive.
To the party of Westernizers in Constantinople there was
also added a pro-Turkish party. Sad as it may be, there
was no true Byzantine-imperial party amongst the
politicians.

The Turkish party was headed by the first
minister and admiral, Grand Duke Notaras. He announced
for all to hear that “It would be better to see
the Turkish chalma cap ruling in the city than the
Latin tiara.” A little later he, the first
minister, was to fully experience just what this ruling
Turkish chalma cap was actually like. When Sultan
Mehmed II took the city, amidst the general pillage and
wild mayhem, he decided to appoint this very Notaras as
head of the city. However, when he learned that the
Grand Duke had a fourteen-year-old son of rare beauty,
he demanded that the son be first surrendered to his
harem of boys. When the shaken Notaras refused, the
Sultan commanded that both he and the boy be beheaded.

The terrible outcome was unfolding inescapably.

O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art
everywhere present and fillest all things, treasury of
good gifts and Giver of life, come and abide in us, and
cleanse us of all impurity, and save our souls, O Good
One.

Narrator. May 29, 1453, after a
siege lasting many months and resisted heroically by
the city’s defense forces, the Turks were able
to break through the upper wall. The defense forces,
frightened, turned to flight. The last Byzantine
Emperor, Constantine Paleologus, remained alone,
abandoned by all. Holding his sword and shield, the
Emperor exclaimed, “Is there not a Christian
who might take off my head?” But there was no
one to answer. The enemies surrounded him, and after
a brief siege, the Turks standing behind the
sovereign killed him with a knife in the back.

Modern Istanbul. The streets of the city. The chant of
the muezzin.

Narrator:(walking through the
city): What more is there to say?... Now a completely
different people are living here, with different laws and
morals. The Byzantine inheritance, foreign to the
invaders, was either destroyed or altered at the root. The
descendents of those Greeks who were not destroyed by the
conquerors were made into second class citizens in their
own land, with no rights, for many long centuries.

A Western advertisement in Istanbul.

The West’s vengeful hatred of Byzantium and her
successors is entirely inexplicable to the West itself; it
goes to some deep genetic level, and—as paradoxical
as this may seem—continues even to the present day.
Without an understanding of this amazing but undeniable
fact, we risk misunderstanding not only distant history,
but event historical events of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries .

In Russia, before the revolution, serious research on
Byzantium was conducted. However, the necessary
conclusions were not drawn from purely theoretical
knowledge…. During the first decades of soviet
government, research in Byzantology was cut off, and then
officially banned. More than that: just in case, the
Bolsheviks repressed all Byzantologists remaining in
Russia; only a few were able to flee abroad.

Research in Byzantology was re-opened in
Russia by a decision from the highest governmental
levels. In 1943, at Stalin’s orders, the
Institute of Byzantology was created, and a
corresponding cathedra in the Moscow State University
was opened. Was there no other time than 1943 to open
such an institute? It is simply that the former
seminarian, Joseph Dzhugashvili, finally understood
from whom they should be studying history.

And the great city of Constantinople, which had oft times
forgotten the ancient laws of its fathers, for which
forgetfulness it did not even preserve its own name,
peforms if only its final service as an instructor, to
retell the story of its greatness—and of the
monumental fall of a great empire.

The chanting of the muezzin over Constantinople grows
louder. The sound of a Russian snowstorm blends into
it.

We are again before a snow-covered Russian church.
With it in the background is heard the prolonged chanting
of the muezzin and the snowstorm. The chanting gradually
disappears. The snowstorm.